While national and international efforts to reverse the trend of deforestation have multiplied in recent years, there is still no clear evidence to suggest that these initiatives are actually working.
A new paper published in One Earth, calls for a radically different approach that focuses on our understanding of how individuals make their choices about forests and livelihoods.
In their paper, the collective of 23 researchers, consultants, and NGO actors from 13 different countries in Europe and North America argue that deforestation and reforestation policies must be as complex as the humans they implicate. The study highlights that despite the plethora of national, international, public, and corporate initiatives in recent years, targets are being missed and trends of deforestation have continued.
In September 2019, for example, major companies Nestlé and Procter & Gamble announced that they would fail to meet their self-imposed targets for zero deforestation, while 10% of the countries involved in the Bonn Challenge have set themselves the impossible target of restoring an area of land that considerably exceeds what is available for restoration within their borders. More recently, during the COVID-19 crisis, there has been a surge of deforestation in Brazil. In all these cases, the driving factor is the way humans make decisions.
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